Touchlight secures government grant to support its £14m investment in scale-up DNA manufacturing

Hampton, UK, 29 March 2023 – Touchlight, a CDMO pioneering enzymatic DNA production to enable genetic medicines, today announced that it has secured a grant from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to support the acceleration of its £14m scale-up DNA manufacturing programme.

The grant comes from the £277 million in joint government and industry backing delivered through the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund. The Fund was launched to support Life Sciences businesses investing in manufacturing projects in the UK. Touchlight will use the grant funding to support its acquisition of scale-up equipment and accelerate its facility expansion in Hampton, UK. The grant will also help drive Touchlight’s ability to enable client API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) programmes in late-stage development and commercialisation.

As a result of the funding, in parallel with the facility expansion, Touchlight will be the first company globally to reach commercial scale with enzymatic DNA technology and will be ideally positioned to supplant plasmid DNA as the primary source of DNA manufacture for advanced therapy by producing multi-kg of DNA per annum.

Making the announcement, George Freeman, Minister of State (Minister for Science, Research and Innovation), visited the Touchlight site in Hampton on Tuesday 28th March, taking a tour of the new GMP manufacturing facility as well as the Quality Control, Analytical and Innovations laboratories and meeting the Touchlight team.

Minister of State for Science, Research & Innovation, George Freeman, said:

“The UK’s £94 billion Life Science sector provides over 250,000 high skill jobs across the UK from drug discovery to diagnostics, medtech devices and digital health.

“The industry is being transformed by the pace of change: from AI to genomics, bio manufacturing to smart stents and personalised immunotherapies, technologies are converging to create a new era of advanced digital products.

“That requires new types of advanced manufacturing plant which is why we set up the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund, which today’s news shows is working: converting £17 million grants to four companies into £260 million industrial investment.”

Access a PDF version of the press release here

Find out more at www.touchlight.com

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About Touchlight

Touchlight is a privately-owned CDMO based in London, U.K., focused on the provision of DNA services and manufacture of enzymatically produced doggybone DNA (dbDNA™) to enable the development of genetic medicines. Touchlight provide rapid, enzymatic DNA development and manufacturing for all advanced therapy production, including mRNA, viral and non-viral gene therapy and DNA API. dbDNA is a minimal, linear, covalently closed structure, which eliminates bacterial sequences. Touchlight’s revolutionary enzymatic production platform enables unprecedented speed, scale, and the ability to target genes with a size and complexity that is impossible with current technologies. Clients can be supported from pre-clinical through development and supply, to licencing and tech transfer for use in-house.

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